


The Search for Moonfall

by 0bsidianFire



Series: Static Tuned in to Reason [1]
Category: Final Fantasy XIV
Genre: 7th Umbral Calamity - Othard POV, Backstory, Dreams, Gen, Origin Story, Theorycrafting, Visions, Worldbuilding, Xaela
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-11-01
Updated: 2017-11-01
Packaged: 2019-01-26 19:43:49
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,950
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12564780
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/0bsidianFire/pseuds/0bsidianFire
Summary: Kharagal Mierqid was known in her tribe for her talent with arcane magics and her curiosity which made sure said arcane talents always stayed sharp. Naturally she poked the pulse of aether that blasted over the Nhaama months after Dalamud's disappearance. Now if only she could get some directions to where that aether originated from...





	The Search for Moonfall

**Author's Note:**

> Backstory for my WoL. I've always wondered what the 7th Umbral Calamity would look like from Othard, or rather the Lunar Transmitter activation.
> 
> I had to make up some lore for the Nhaama Desert Xaela tribes. Wandering a desert is very different then wandering a grassland. Especially for the Mierqid. What type of insanity is needed to bury stuff all over a desert and then expect to find it again anyway?

The night that marked the start of the end of Kharagal's time in the Nahaama started like all the others. In the desert, dusk often marks the start of a day's travel. For the Mierqid tribe, it is the time of day when Nahaama's Map, the constellations used to navigate to their supply caches, becomes visible. But most of all, dusk is the time of day when the moons rise.

Kharagal double-checked that the arcane wards around the caches were back in place and would last the year. While other tribes hauled their supplies around behind their herds, the Meirqid tribe buried theirs in the desert and rode their herds between caches. Given the importance of the caches, most of them were guarded by the best offensive magics the Mierqid knew of.

Satisfied that they would hold, Kharagal rolled up the parchment the reference geometries were on and stuck it a pouch on her belt. Around her, camp was breaking and the few supplies the Merqid were taking with them were being bundled up and loaded onto gembucks, the large desert antelopes the Meirqid herded. Kharagal threaded her way though the commotion to where the yols roosted. She whistled and her own gold and black yol made it way over to her. As usual, it started combing her messy ponytail with its beak. "Oh stop it," Kharagal mock-protested as she pulled her light purple hair away from it. "How am I supposed to load you if you keep doing this?" In response, the yol went right back to messing with her hair. Kharagal rolled her eyes and began tying light pouches around her yol's legs. Yols weren't bred to carry things, but there was no way Kharagal was going to trust anyone else with spell geometries. Even when several copies of the geometries existed.

A scream interrupted her. Kharagal scanned the horizon, but there was no one on it. Whispers started flying around the camp and Kharagal stopped what she was doing and headed toward where her family was packing up.

She was nearly there when she made out what the whispers where. "Where's Dalamud?" someone said. Kharagal's eyes instantly went to the full moon rising out of the eastern horizon and blinked. Dalamud wasn't there. If the moon was full, Dalamud should have been a small white dot in the upper left hand corner at moonrise. Instead, the moon rested on the horizon by itself. It was one of the eeriest things Kharagal had ever seen. A scan of the skies revealed that nothing else had disappeared at least; the Pitcher was nearly resting on the moon as it should be, overhead was Bardam's Spear aimed toward the steppes and the Pillar was starting to set in the east. 

Kharagal slowly made her way to her family. Like everyone else, they were talking among themselves. The only person not talking was Jagadai her cousin. He was squinting at the moon and had his "aether is weird right now" look on his face.

Kharagal went over to him and looked at the moon with him. "Jagadai, what's going on up there?" If anyone would know what happening with the sky, Jagadai would. Kharagal's magical talents lay with patterning aether in arcane geometries; Jagadai's talents lay with tuning into the aether of the stars.

He quite for a moment and ran his thumb up and down the curve of his horn, an old nervous tic. "It's like... there was a hole in the aether that came from the sky. And now it's not there anymore... the aether isn't draining though it? So we're finally feeling it?" He met her eyes. "I don't know. I'll know more when we get to Aragibal Khaat and I can talk with the other udgan there." At Kharagal's puzzled look he said, "Khan Yerentai came by just before you did and said we'll be taking a detour through there."

Kharagal nodded. "That's probably a good idea." Aragibal Khaat was a huge oasis where the desert tribes met up when there was news to share. The Kagon tribe would more then likely be at Aragibal Khaat too. If anyone would know what was happening with the moons it would be the tribe that shunned Azim and worshiped Nahaama above all else.

* * *

As it turned out, no one actually knew what was up with the moons. All anyone knew for sure was the one day, Dalamud had disappeared. The udgan did point out that Dalamud was known to be the jailer of something the same way Nahaama was (why else was Dalamud a lesser moon instead of a lesser sun?) and that maybe whatever Dalamud had been keeping captive didn't need to be jailed anymore. But few people put too much stock in what they said. After all, there were legends that said that Azim and Nhaama were siblings and not lovers, that Dalamud was Nhaama's first child that wasn't mortal enough, and that Azim wasn't so much Nhaama's enemy as he was a distraction from her job of keeping an eye on the real enemy that was jailed in the moon. One more legend wasn't going to change much.

What everyone did agree on was that Dalamud was the only thing that had changed in the heavens. Weeks of observing the sky revealed that nothing else had moved or changed off-schedule. The moon itself rose when it should and changed phases when it should, the constellations creeped across the sky like normal and the sun was still rising and setting. In short, the sky could still be relied on to navigate the desert and that was what most of the Xaela cared about. The few mages that were closely attuned to stellar aether did all agree that the aether coming from where Dalamud should have been was different now and that there was surprisingly more of it rather then less. Even they couldn't think of anything that could cause something like that to happen.

It would be a long time before anyone realized the disappearance of Dalamud was more then just the disappearance of a moon.

* * *

Months after Dalamud's disappearance, Kharagal was copying out arcane geometries in camp next to the Tail Mountains. She was tracing out the fine lines of a poison spell when a blast of aether rolled over the landscape. For minutes, it tinted everything with a golden-blue-white aura. On an impulse, Kharagal mentally tried to poke it with her aetheral senses and winced. She had barley brushed against it when the aether seared across her senses like a line of molten metal.

The aether receded as quickly as it came and Kharagal cursed when she saw that she had messed up the arcane geometry; electrum ink was expensive. A glance around the camp revealed that only the people Kharagal knew were sensitive to aether were acting like they had seen the same thing she had. Whatever that was. Hopefully it wasn't as serious as Dalamud disappearing.

"You felt that... right?" Jagadai was standing over her with several haunches of meat slung over one shoulder.

"Kind of hard not too." Kharagal began rolling up ink and brushes in leather. "I decided to poke it and got burned for it." She stood up and she and Jagadai started walking toward the center of camp. 

"Decided to..." Jagadai stared at her. "You're lucky that's all that happened... Do you know what that aether was?"

Kharagal shook her head. "No. It felt like I'd touched a furnace though."

Jagadai shook his head at her. "Remember when Dalamud disappeared and I said it was like aether stopped draining out of the sky?" At Kharagal's nod he continued, "Well... That wave felt like all the aether that was drained out of the sky was released at once... but it was... different. More... structured I guess?"

"Structured?" Kharagal frowned. "I thought the structure of the sky was what made stellar aether, stellar aether to begin with."

"It is. This structure was... scattered... like it had already dissipated a lot." Jagadai and Kharagal had reached their tent by this time and lingered outside it. "I've never felt anything like it."

"So you're saying that wave was a bunch of stellar aether that used to be part of an unknown arcane geometry..." Kharagal trailed off as she remembered what often happened when an arcane geometry wasn't structured correctly. "Nhaama's Horns," she swore, "that could have been so much worse."

"Yeah... I would not want to be wherever that spell landed first."

Kharagal blinked and scowled playfully. "Could you understate that anymore, Jagadai," she teased and she followed him into the tent.

* * *

Kharagal Dreamed that night.

Nhaama hangs low and full in western sky beyond the desert. Dalamud is still next to her. As Kharagal watches, Dalamud falls from Nhaama toward the horizon, glowing red and growing in size. It drops over the horizon and the same golden-blue-white aether roars up from where it disappears. 

Kharagal reaches out and touches the aether. Like before, it sears her. Unlike before it doesn't bother her. Jagadai was both wrong and right she realizes. It is stellar aether, but not like Jagadai thinks it is. There is intent and purpose behind it, like when someone casts a spell. And the geometry for that spell is mind-numbingly huge.

_How would anyone manage to cast you?_ Kharagal traces out the geometry the aether forms as well as she is able. _No one would ever be able to hold this much aether at once. Never mind calculate all the angles needed..._

Laughter interrupts her. _"If you desire to find out, you will have to go where Dalamud is. The answer lies there."_

Kharagal gapes at Nhaama. "You... want me find out what happened to Dalamud and what this spell is?"

Nhaama smiles. _"You want to find out for yourself. I am just giving you directions._ She points to where Dalamud fell beyond the horizon with a finger of moonbeams. _"You will have to travel west to find it. For you it will take a while."_

Kharagal nods. "I'll find it." Refusing a goddess when they were in a truly generous mood was never a good idea the legends said.

_I know you will,_ says Nhaama and everything fades to black.

Kharagal woke up to the black ceiling of her family's tent. _No way._ Not caring that it was past dawn, Kharagal left to go to the udgan. If she was right, she'd had a vision of Nhaama telling her to go find Dalamud. They would know if it was a true vision or not.

It turned out it was a true vision and Kharagal Mierqid started out on her journey when the moon rose.

* * *

It took Kharagal five years to get to where Dalamud fell. Some of it was spent crossing the desert and the steppe. She spent a few years on the Ruby Sea with the Confederacy navigating the islands and refining their maps. By the time she left, she'd discovered pirate crews were more like the tribes back home then she'd thought and she would forever speak Hingan with a thick Confederacy accent. In Kugane she learned of how the rest of world recorded arcane geometries in books and fell in love with them. It was also there that she first learned of Eorzea, the land where Dalamud fell.

Kharagal wasted no time in traveling there; she had a fallen moon to find. And if the Dream on the trip over was correct, someone (something?) really didn't want her to find out what had happened to it. Unfortunately for them, Kharagal's curiosity would not be deterred and would become something of a legend in it's own right...

**Author's Note:**

> I figure Othard is far enough away from Eorzea that they wouldn't be able to see Dalamud falling, assuming Dalamud is in geosynchronous orbit with the Lunar Transmitter. Ironically, Othard probably realized much sooner then Eorzea that something was Very Wrong with Dalamud. Too bad the lore book says it takes at least two months to get from Doma to Limsa Lominsa, so who knows when that would be in the 1.x story.
> 
> One of the only things known about the Mierqid Tribe is that they are a desert tribe with over a hundred buried caches of supplies that they travel to and restock over a year. So they've got to have some way of always knowing where those caches are (navigation) and some way of keeping the rest of the tribes from finding/getting into them (arcane protections). I'd imagine finding dead Au Ra around caches is fairly common. Gembucks, the animals I have them herd, actually exist in real life and really are found in a desert ecology like The Nhaama. Although given that this is Final Fantasy XIV, the name is based on what their horns are made out of rather then borrowing it from another language.


End file.
